


avec mon cœur marteau

by scionblad



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25122919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scionblad/pseuds/scionblad
Summary: Between that rose and having to keep an eye on M Damocles, Ladybug finds herself thinking a little bit more about Chat Noir. Just a little bit.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	avec mon cœur marteau

**Author's Note:**

> this is very old and very unpolished but it's ladynoir july, bitch. yall have a good one

“Milady,” said Chat Noir once, while they sat side by side on the rooftop by M Damocles’s home. “Do you ever think about how the frame data changed from Mecha Strike 2 to Mecha Strike 3, making combos slightly easier and therefore more accessible to newcomers?”

Ladybug looked at him strangely. He was stretched out on his stomach, lounging easily on the roof like one might do on a hot summer day with a cold drink in hand, as though thoroughly unconcerned with anything that was happening with their tail. She tried not to think about how she was missing an opportunity to play Mecha Strike with Alya and sighed. 

“No?” she tried. “Is that really a thing?”

He shrugged casually. “Just thought it was interesting, you know.”

“Guess so,” said Ladybug absentmindedly, her gaze trained on M Damocles. He didn’t seem to understand the concept of blinds or curtains, and lounged in his apartment watching the news. Nadia Chamack’s little digital head bobbed with the delivery of her report, and with it, M Damocles nodded along. 

She sighed. It had been her idea to keep an eye on M Damocles after four separate occasions in which he’d gotten himself hurt trying to do good, and Chat had happily obliged her request, though now she was starting to have doubts about his cheerful compliance.

“I mean, I don’t know about you, but definitely some of NAD03’s moves got way easier to execute so he kinda went up in the tier lists.” Chat Noir’s belt-tail flicked lazily as he spoke. “But he’s still not nearly as good as MX-01, which is incredibly annoying.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hey, you ever think about just  _ how  _ wildly unconventional a fighting game Mecha Strike is? No other game I know of has that weird level-up experience mechanic, and I’ve played every  _ Tekken  _ that’s come out since the PS3.”

In the window, M Damocles shifted, stood up, and moved to the kitchen of the apartment. Ladybug craned her neck to keep him in her line of sight.

Chat Noir rolled over too, so that his head was hanging over the ledge of the roof and he was watching the apartment window upside down. “I mean, I don’t mind it at all, because it makes the fighting game formula kinda fresh, and that’s why I enjoy  _ Mecha Strike  _ even when there’s really fun games out there like the  _ Dragon Ball Z  _ fighter, or  _ Skullgirls—“ _

“Chat?”

He paused, looked up. “Yes, milady?”

“What’s this have to do with M Damocles?”

A casual shrug, a flick of the belt-tail. “Nothing. I simply wanted to make meaningful conversation with you.”

She couldn’t help a laugh, then. Simple conversation? Her and Chat Noir? They didn’t…  _ do  _ casual conversation. It was all banter and sharp insights as to where the akuma hid (and then sometimes,  _ sometimes,  _ a reassurance so warm that it would reach down into her heart like liquid courage—but only sometimes). The last real conversation was, well, telling Chat Noir she was interested in someone else. A sober conversation that left a strange taste on the words she chose to speak now.

“Now, of all times?” she asked him. 

“Extenuating circumstances.”

Sure, extenuating, sitting on a rooftop watching her collège principal drink a glass of wine and watch trashy evening dramas. She rolled her eyes. “Maybe.”

“Let me indulge in the pleasure of your company, milady.”

His cute baby kitten eyes left her splitting her face into a grin. “All right, kitty,” she said, laughing. “What do you want to talk about?”

_ “Well,  _ if we may continue on the subject, did you ever play the first Mecha Strike?” he asked casually.

“No,” she admitted. “My papa did, though, and he’s played every one since, when he has free time.”

“You played with your father?” Chat Noir’s eyes grew faraway. “That sounds amazing.”

“With friends, too, of course, but I play with my dad the most.”

“I only ever played online,” Chat Noir admitted. “But I wish I could’ve played with my friends sooner. Maybe we can play together someday, milady.”

“Yeah,” she said absently. The conversation was reminding her more and more that Alya had asked to play with her. How many days in a row had it been that she’d had to turn down a session of video games and friendly gossip at Alya’s house again? The third time this week, at least. Though, she reasoned, it wasn’t as if Alya had absolutely nobody else to play with—Max, Kim, Alix, there was a good amount of people their age who played.

Maybe, she mused silently to herself, Chat Noir was in his last year of collège too? 

It didn’t really make sense but the little strand of possibility, of Chat Noir’s civilian self, that he was a real person with homework and friends to play video games with, was something that warmed a space right behind her ribs.

“Are you there, milady?”

“Oh!” Chat Noir was blinking up at her, and Ladybug rearranged her expression to smile at him. “Sorry about that, kitty.”

“I asked who you main in Mecha Strike,” he said, a chin in his hand. “If that’s not too intrusive a question.”

“LB-03.” Ladybug smirked. “You?”

“NAD03,” said Chat Noir, laughing. “How very like you to like the ladybug fighter.”

She shrugged. “Can’t help it. But I have to admit, all this talking makes me want to play it, and I was  _ going  _ to play it with my friend today…”

“Oh, really?” Chat sighed and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. “Then what else do we have in common, other than Mecha Strike?”

“Probably best we don’t get into that,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chin. “We can’t give away too much about each other.”

His mouth twitched into a ghost of a smile for a brief moment, before drawing back into a more neutral expression. 

“Of course,” said Chat Noir. “We are superheroes, after all.”

It echoed her comment from the other night, that whirlwind of ice cream and rose petals and candles. She turned her head to look at him.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a soft voice. “I—I wish we got to know each other better, too. Like normal people.”

His green eyes softened to match her tone, and he quirked one corner of his mouth up.

“Nah.”

“Nah?” she echoed.

“If we knew each other as just normal people, and only as normal people, then we wouldn’t be  _ us,  _ we wouldn’t be Ladybug and Chat Noir.” He sat up, closing his eyes with a content sigh. “And what we have, who we are, what we do, I wouldn’t give that up for the world.”

She hummed, not loudly, but enough to acknowledge her hearing him.

“That’s why we can’t know,” she murmured. “If someone knew then… they could take it away from us.”

There was a silence between them that felt to her like an acknowledgement of that fact. Chat Noir’s eyes opened and met hers, and between them she could see the quiet fear of having their relationship taken away, their special understanding and unwavering unspoken trust gone, with no way to get it back. It was more intimate than she’d been with him before, even more than the other night when he’d given her that rose and kissed her cheek in the light of the full moon. Of course it was intimate that time—the truth had come out in ways that they hadn’t spoken of until then, but now, now it was as if the noise of their heartbeats and the acute darkness of his pupils boring into hers felt more truthful than anything she’d known before.

It was a half-lie, actually—she’d seen it once, when Adrien had given her that umbrella, spoken softly to her, confessed he was new at making friends. But it was different—but it was the same.

She couldn’t tear her gaze away, even when Chat Noir did, his eyes turning back towards Damocles’s window.

“Oh” he said. “Looks like M Damocles is going to sleep.”

In fact, he was; the lights in the apartment had turned off and he had left the main room to go to the bedroom. Ladybug stood up.

“Tomorrow, then,” she said, part question, part statement.

“Of course milady,” said Chat Noir with a wink and a hand over his heart. She rolled her eyes good-naturedly and threw her yo-yo to swing away.

When she landed on her bed through the skylight, she de-transformed. Tikki flew in a playful spiral out of her earrings and made a beeline for the purse of macarons hanging from a hook on the wall. Marinette sighed and rubbed her face in her pillow.

“Tired?” chuckled Tikki as she floated up beside Marinette’s face, a pink pastry in her hands. 

“I missed a whole day to hang out with Alya,” said Marinette, her voice muffled by fabric. “And now it’s already time for bed…”

“Your duties as Ladybug are too important.” Tikki took another bite. “Maybe, though, you ought to figure out a way to end it so you don’t have to keep watch over M Damocles all the time.”

“Later,” said Marinette, heaving herself up. “For now I’ll take a bath.”

The rose he’d given her on that day‚ the whirlwind of ice cream and rose petals and candles, sat in her room while she got ready for bed, washed her face and changed into pajamas, but she didn’t yet tuck herself in, instead sitting idly in her post-shower haze on top of her duvet and looking at the rose on its place on her desk.

_ You’re in love with Ladybug?  _

_ For real? _

There had been boys who had liked her before—Nino for one, and of course Nathanael, who had gotten akumatized after Chloé had made fun of his crush. But at the time they were passing revelations, ones that gave her only a moment’s pause at the novelty of it. Chat Noir’s tender confession from last night made her heart ache terribly in confusion, and it had ached for days now, even more tender and sore after last night.

It didn’t seem right, either. She was in love with Adrien, of course, and that had no bearing on her relationship with Chat Noir. None at all! Alya’s farfetched theory that Adrien looked like Chat Noir was, in Chloé’s words, utterly ridiculous. It was. It really was, really!

And yet—she fiddled with bits of broken skin on her cuticle, her eyes both fixed on the rose and on that memory of Chat’s eyes—yet the moment last night on the roof had been different, had been the same.

Maybe she just had a type.

“Penny for your thoughts?” asked Tikki. “You were staring at that rose pretty intently.”

Her kwami was floating in front of her just off to her left. She gave Tikki a smile. “Nothing, Tikki. Just spacing out and feeling super tired.”

“All right, then,” chirped Tikki. “If you say so.”

There was a mischievous look in Tikki’s huge blue eyes that Marinette tried to ignore, though it still tugged at her like an itch she couldn’t quite scratch.

If there was even a little push, the tiniest bit of a chance between something between her and Chat Noir, then it had gotten bigger. She had seen a strange but not uninviting piece of him. He had never come off like he’d had layers. It was more like he’d never seemed to have them in the first place, shrouded in the black of his mask, and what was underneath existing at all was what struck her—and oh, the tenderness of it all. A boy with a heart as soft as molten gold.

She wondered what a romance with Chat Noir might feel like. The boy behind the mask, for now, was faceless, but maybe he wasn’t bad-looking; blond hair and green eyes was a combo that was hard to get wrong. He was bravado and talk and overly dramatic gestures, but the new Chat Noir was—he was a  _ boy.  _ She imagined rose petaled, candlelit dinners on rooftops and in restaurants and apartments. She imagined secrets shared and whispered late into the night; she imagined tender smiles exchanged and greeting kisses on soft skin instead of tentative air; she imagined tenderly wrapping arms around his neck while his carried her by her back and the crook of her knees (but that she did not need to imagine, memory served that purpose more than well).

But for all her imagining she couldn’t help but imagine Adrien’s face, Adrien’s laugh and smile and voice, Adrien’s arms around her waist. The warmth sprung to her cheeks, then—same, but different; different, but the same.

There would be a hint of what Chat Noir said in everything Adrien did, now. The thought struck her quickly, with a white-hot jolt, but despite her attempts to quell the connection, it was stuck in her gut now, turning at the memory of Chat’s smile, Adrien’s laugh, Chat’s green eyes, Adrien’s blond hair. The way Adrien had laid his hand on her shoulder in friendly affection—the way Chat had looked at her gently, with nothing but wonder and warm unwavering belief.

She rubbed her eyes. It was getting late. She had school tomorrow, so she pulled the covers up to her chest and closed her eyes.

“Good night, Tikki,” she murmured.

“Good night, Marinette.”


End file.
